Quantum News Nexus

A quick quantum news update to read by the light of the fireworks:

SEEQC has become the latest quantum computing company to target an IPO, announcing it filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed IPO. There are no further details available yet about the timing, only that the company intends to have its stock traded under the symbol “SEQC” on Nasdaq. 

This move comes about six months after the Elmsford, New York, company announced plans to merge with Allegro Merger Corp., along with a plan to hold an IPO “concurrent” with the closing of the deal. SEEQC is looking to become at least the fifth quantum company to have its stock debut in 2026, following Quantinuum, Infleqtion, Xanadu, and Horizon Quantum.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced an agreement with SRI International, a nonprofit research and development institution, to create a Quantum Manufacturing Engineering Center (QMEC), in which NIST plans to make an initial investment of $20 million. This announcement  represents the latest domino to fall after the Trump administration’s recent Executive Orders on quantum, and comes almost eight years after NIST established a cooperative R&D agreement with SRI, an organization with a long history of federal government contracts. One gets the feeling the EOs are causing various government departments to revisit previous or ongoing projects and partnerships and upgrade or polish them up in an effort to satisfy new EO demands.

“Quantum science promises to generate new knowledge and technologies that will supercharge scientific research and unlock enormous economic potential,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Paul Dabbar. “The new Quantum Manufacturing Engineering Center will bring together top experts to ensure both continued U.S. leadership in quantum technologies and that we are the epicenter of manufacturing quantum systems at scale to drive advances in sensing, communications, encryption, computing, biomedicine and other critical areas.” 

China’s SpinQ said it had raised 1 billion RMB (about $148 million USD). From the release, “The new funding will be used to accelerate SpinQ’s full-stack development of fault-tolerant general-purpose quantum computers, upgrade core manufacturing processes, and expand its global ecosystem. The company said the investment will further strengthen its capabilities in quantum error correction, hardware-software integration, and large-scale commercialization. SpinQ is also expanding its technology exploration into the convergence of quantum computing, supercomputing, and intelligent computing, as well as Quantum + AI. The company believes these directions could help shape next-generation heterogeneous computing infrastructure, enabling QPUs, CPUs, and GPUs to work together more effectively, while using AI to accelerate progress in quantum hardware, error correction, and real-world applications.”

SpinQ has been around for more than 10 years, and earlier this decade made waves with a plan to make “portable” room-temperature quantum computers. This had the sector buzzing for a while about the potential for quantum PCs and laptops. Though SpinQ still offers smaller machines focused on quantum educational and research applications, not much has come of the quantum PC movement.

SandboxAQ, which sprang from Google parent Alphabet a little over four years ago, is making its Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) available via Google Cloud Marketplace. This announcement comes less than two weeks after SandboxAQ said it will receive a $500 million CHIPS R&D grant, and a month after the company said its LQMs would be integrated with Anthropic’s Claude.

D-Wave Quantum is getting a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to support its role in a Yale-led project pursuing fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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